Ripple

What is Ripple?

Ripple is built for enterprise use. Ripple offers a reliable way to make payments all over the world. This is most interesting for banks and payment providers. Ripple is much faster comparing to Bitcoin or Ethereum.

For example, payments with Ripple are settled in 4 seconds. Where Ethereum and Bitcoin need several minutes. Traditional payments systems need several days.

Ripple handles a consistent 1500 transactions per second. In comparison, Visa handles 50.000 transactions per second. Ripple mentioned on their website that they can scale to the same throughput as Visa.

Ripple uses the POS algorithm. That means no energy is “wasted” to mine coins. Millions of dollars are spent every month to mine Bitcoins or Ethers. Ripple has practically no transactions fees. And unlike Bitcoin, Ripple can be used to send any type of currency.

Mining algorithm

Ripple uses a POS (Proof of Stake) algorithm named RPCA (Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm). RPCA is applied every few seconds by all nodes in the Ripple network. This is used to maintain consensus and agreement on the network. Using POS instead of POW means that Ripple cannot be mined.

Once there is consensus on the network, the current ledger is considered closed and becomes the last ledger. That means that the last closed ledger will be identical on all nodes in the Ripple network. If you want to know more details about RPCA, you should read the official Ripple White paper about consensus.

Some people consider POS more secure and reliable over POW. For example, Ethereum is making progress to update from POW to POS.

Ripple circulation and block info

You should know that the majority of Ripples are owned by the Ripple company. Because of this, Ripple decided to freeze their own funds (XRP tokens) which are currently worth billions. They freeze billions of dollars into smart contracts. These smart contracts will release 1 billion XRP tokens every month for about 4.5 years.

This way Ripple wants to send out a message to all people who invested in Ripple. Ripple is here for the long term. By freezing their own funds, they hope that people will not be afraid that XRP tokens will flood the market.

Now you could doubt that when a company is holding that many tokens in the first place is a good idea at all. That basically means Ripple is in complete control of the market. And this is not without reason.

There are 100,000,000,000 maximum Ripples. There are 38,343,841,883 in the current supply. The other majority of XRP is hold by the company. You can find transactions and other information on the Ripple blockchain explorer.

What can you do with Ripple?

First of all, you should know Ripple is working together with banks and governments. Ripple needs banks and payment processors to use its network. Where cryptocurrencies, in general, are more decentralized, Ripple is actually pretty centralized. And since Ripple is working together with banks, this might not be the coin to invest based on your principles.

Ripple acts as the central bank in the Ripple network. Now that might not be a bad idea. But Ripple holds the majority of coins. Ripple is a great technology and offers many improvements over current money systems. But the lack of decentralization and the fact that Ripple company holds the majority of coins may be a bad sign.

What can you do with Ripple? If you’re not an enterprise and plan on using the Ripple network, you can trade XRP on exchanges. Hoping that Ripple will be adopted by all banking systems in the world and the prices might rise.